Topics - CheezWiz

I come in peace from the pre-law board and repeat a post I made there because, well, you may actually have experience paying law school tuition.

I just got my tuition bill/financial aid letter for C-M. There was a 16% rise in tuition from last academic year to this academic year. Is that kind of rise same as/more than/less than at other law schools? I just want to anticipate paying 45-or-so% more than I expected over three years.

Ok, ye who have taken classes at C-M. What professors are stars and which ones should one steer clear of? I know as 1L’s we won’t have much control over who we take but it would be nice to hear some feedback on who you have taken and what you thought of them.

I just got my tuition bill/financial aid letter for C-M. There was a 16% rise in tuition from last academic year to this academic year. Is that kind of rise same as/more than/less than at other law schools? I just want to anticipate paying 45-or-so% more than I expected over three years.

I am pleased to inform you that the Accreditation Committee of the American Bar Association voted to recommend full accreditation for Ave Maria School of Law. The matter now moves to the Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education, which has the authority to make the decision. The Council will consider the Accreditation Committee’s favorable recommendation at the June 17, 2005 meeting. The Council's decision will then be presented to the ABA House of Delegates at the ABA's annual meeting in August for ratification.

I got into Cleveland-Marshall.. I GET TO GO HOME!!!! I am going to their LCOP program so I have to be back in the area ALOT sooner than I thought. I sent a letter of continued interest overnight last week it got there on March 30th letter dated March 31st. But there are others who got in at the same time so I don't know if it was my letter or if it was in the works. At any rate, I now present for your viewing pleasure my "I got in dace" preformed by Snoopy.

I haven’t heard from this Cleveland State yet. North East Ohio is my home so I am getting anxious. Thusly, every time the wind blows from the east I wonder if it’s a sign. I overnighted a passionate letter of continued interest last week. Today, I got an e-mail from “Marion D. Ensley” with the following:

This message is to verify the email address for CheezWiz. Please respond by clicking the reply button above and then indicate whether you are the individual named here.

Thank YouCleveland-Marshall College of LawOffice of Law Admissions

Is it a sign? C-M does not do e-mail or telephone decisions from what I’ve heard. Did anybody else get this? Do you think it’s just a random update or a sign that they want to ensure it’s me before they send a decision by e-mail?

I have been rejected at most of the schools I thought I had a chance to get into. I now only have slight to far reaches so I am being realistic and focusing on the one and only acceptance I have received which is at Western New England. This is the first time I am out and on my own financially (no paternal help).

In my estimation I am looking at $49,753 per year or $149,259 for my JD. That’s tuition and fees, insurance, $1,500 for books (is that too high/low?), and $1,500/month living expenses. I will qualify for subsidized student loans but, of course, my amount is over the amount one can barrow. So I have to add X amount for interest for a private loan to that. So $160,000 to $170,000 for the whole enchilada.

I want to do public interest. WNEC is a T4 school. Those two things combined will make me lucky to make $40,000 to $5X,000/year post grad. Am I about right with this? I think I can live on $3000-$4000 a month so that leaves me making payments of just under $1,000/month to the loan. So it should be paid off in about 14 to 15 years.

Am I missing something? What are your thoughts on paying a premium for a lower-grade (that sounds horrible) law school? I’m down and in a really bad spot right now Pease share your thoughts.

I am the only black person on my mother's side of the family. One of my family members from that side of the family sent me this article in the mail. I've got yelled about it, got sad about it, and not I'm confused as to why the hell they would send me something like this. The even highlighted (see below) the most negative sections!

How do I respond to this without rage? Your thoughts on the article?_____________________________________________________________________

For Blacks in Law School, Can Less Be More?By ADAM LIPTAK

Published in New York Times: February 13, 2005

NE would have thought, given the decades of ardent debate over affirmative action in higher education, that the main axes of the dispute had been established. Defenders of racial preferences say that they compensate for historical wrongs, ensure vibrant and varied campus discourse and help create minority role models and leaders. Opponents say preferences are nothing but a reverse form of discrimination that stereotypes and stigmatizes minority students.

But a recent study published in The Stanford Law Review by Richard H. Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has found a new way to inflame the debate. In fact, the study has ignited what may be the fiercest dispute over affirmative action since 2003, when the Supreme Court found some forms of it to be constitutional.

Professor Sander's study tests a simple, but startling, thesis: Affirmative action actually depresses the number of black lawyers, because many black students end up attending law schools that are too difficult for them, and perform badly.

If black law students were accepted to lesser law schools under race-blind admissions, Professor Sander writes, they would receive better grades and pass the bar in greater numbers. Even accounting for the many black students who could not attend any law school without affirmative action, the ultimate number of black lawyers would still increase, he concludes.

That assertion, which is based on a great deal of data, along with inference and speculation, has provoked an outpouring of written critiques from law professors, economists and social scientists. Several will be published in The Stanford Law Review's May issue.

Professor Sander, who is white, says he came to his conclusion reluctantly. He notes that he helped found a fair-housing group in Southern California and that his son is biracial. He says he "favors race-conscious strategies in principle, if they can be pragmatically justified."

His critics generally accept, and sometimes even praise, aspects of his empirical work. He shows three large gaps between black and white students: their academic credentials before entering law school, their grades in law school and their success on bar examinations.

But many critics dispute Professor Sander's assertion that the first gap - in undergraduate grades and L.S.A.T. scores - causes the next two, in law school grades and in rates of passing the bar.

The basic numbers are not in serious dispute.

Using a standard 1,000-point scale to reflect both L.S.A.T. scores and undergraduate grade-point averages, Professor Sander writes, the average black student's score was 130 to 170 points below that of the average white student.

Once at law school, the average black student gets lower grades than white students: 52 percent of black students are in the bottom 10th of their first-year law school classes, while only 8 percent are in the top half. And the grades of black students drop slightly in relative terms from the first year of law school to the third.

Black students are twice as likely as whites to fail to finish law school. Nineteen percent of the black students who started law school in 1991 had failed to graduate five years later; the corresponding figure for whites was 8 percent.

About 88 percent of all law students pass a bar exam on the first attempt; 95 percent pass eventually. For blacks, the corresponding figures are 61 percent and 78 percent.

Timothy T. Clydesdale, who teaches sociology at the College of New Jersey, says the law school environment, and not affirmative action, suppresses the grades of some law students.

"Something intrinsic to the structure or process of legal education affects the grades of all minorities," he writes in the fall issue of Law and Social Inquiry. Professor Clydesdale agrees with Professor Sander, however, that bar passage rates are determined primarily by law school grades.

Professor Sander concedes that 14 percent fewer black students would enter law school without preferences. But because more of those who do get in would get good grades at schools that are better suited to them, more would graduate, he said, yielding 8 percent more black lawyers.

The critics run their own numbers and conclude that without affirmative action, the number of black lawyers would fall anywhere from 9 percent to 35 percent.

James Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern who has followed the debate, cautioned that none of these numbers should be taken seriously.

"In the real world, too many things would change," he said in an interview.

Professor Sander's study may be most vulnerable in its assessment of the top law schools, where the vast majority of law students of all races graduate and pass the bar.

For instance, Richard O. Lempert, a law professor at the University of Michigan, said that the university's law school had found little difference between its black and white students in rates of graduation, in passing the bar or in income afterward. "We think the fact that Michigan is an elite law school has a lot to do with it," he wrote in an e-mail message. "Sander's data, though he barely mentions it, convey essentially the same story. Thus his analysis provides no case for the Harvards, Yales and Columbias of this world to abandon affirmative action."

But the situation may be different at less prestigious schools.

Ian Ayres and Richard Brooks, two Yale Law School professors who are harshly critical of other aspects of the Sander study, used its data for their own study of law schools, which showed that 41.2 percent of black law students - based on their undergraduate credentials and the law schools they attend - have less than a fifty-fifty chance of becoming lawyers. The corresponding number for whites is 0.2 percent. "For some of these people," they write in a draft critique, "the investment in law school seems riskier than getting married in Las Vegas."

"While we reject Sander's conclusion that affirmative action has reduced the number of black attorneys," Professors Ayres and Brooks write, "we are more sympathetic to his idea that there is a class of black law students who shouldn't have gone to law school."

Wherever the debate ultimately leads, said Ed Johnson, a research economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Professor Sander's overall hypothesis is a valuable step in trying to understand a complex phenomenon.

"His story does seem to fit the data pretty well," Mr. Johnson said. "That doesn't mean it's true. But it's hard to come up with an alternative explanation. In his favor, he's told a story that's at least a story."